Jim Hall

From the oil fields of Texas came a very innovative race car builder

Jim Hall from Hemmings Muscle Machines

Getting banned would normally be considered a black mark on your record, but when it happens in racing because of some innovation that no one else thought of, it's a badge of honor. On those terms, there might be no more honorable man in motorsports than Jim Hall.
Armed with an engineering degree from CalTech and having just started in the oil business with his brothers, the 26-year-old Hall founded Chaparral Cars in 1962. What followed was a string of new ideas that changed motor racing forever.
In the late 1950s, Hall raced sports cars while also working at a Dallas sports car dealership owned by his brother, Dick, and Carroll Shelby. The first car to wear the Chaparral name was a conventional front-engined machine that was an evolution of the Scarab. Built in California in 1961, it didn't earn any victories until 1962. During this same period, Hall partnered with Hap Sharp, a competitor on the track and a customer from the dealership, to form Chaparral in Midland, Texas, to build and race sports cars.
It really took the mid-engined Chaparral 2 to put their names on the map. With a monocoque chassis that included an integral fiberglass tub and power from an aluminum 327 Chevrolet V-8 mated to an automatic transmission, the 2 electrified the crowds as much as it drew more than a passing glance from the competition. The team started racking up titles in 1964 and 1965, taking home the winner's trophy in 22 of 39 events entered, earning titles for Hall and his team in the USRRC.
While renting Chaparral's private test track--Rattlesnake Raceway--to investigate the Corvair's handling, Chevrolet began a relationship with Hall that resulted in Chevy supplying automatic transaxles, engines and some nearly complete cars. A series of Chaparral 2s followed, some an evolution of previous designs, others a clean-slate approach; some with significant input from Chevrolet, others built 100 percent in Texas. In Europe, they topped the podium at the Nürburgring. In the U.S., they won at Sebring. But it was in the Can-Am series that the most audacious and brilliant work from Chaparral made its mark.
Hall took advantage of the Can-Am's largely unlimited formula and thin rulebook when the series started in 1966 and debuted the 2E, which embraced aerodynamics as no previous race car had, its six-foot-high movable wing attached directly to the axles via long struts. The 2E remains Hall's favorite car. "It really encompasses all of the things that we thought you ought to do to a race car at that point in our career," Hall recounts. "It's got a lot of interesting things about it." Despite not racking up the wins, innovation flowed freely from Midland. Radiators were moved to the rear of the car to allow for a radically more aerodynamic front end. The narrow and slippery 2H was the first race car to be a true monocoque that included the stressed outer body as a structural element.
As for his contributions to racing, a proud Hall says, "I'm really the first guy to recognize that if you place a vertical downforce through aerodynamics on a car, that you can really improve its performance and its handling both so that it will go around corners faster. When I figured it out in late 1963, it changed the whole game plan. Once it was established that if you put downforce on these cars, performances really improved, then it just changed everything the way race cars are thought about."
When suspension-mounted wings and movable aero devices were banned following the 1969 season, Chaparral introduced the homely 2J, the so-called "sucker car." Largely developed by GM, it used a two-stroke engine to power two large fans at the rear of the car to create an under-car vacuum that theoretically meant it could drive on the ceiling, though it suffered none of the drag that a wing created. The FIA banned it despite no actual aerodynamic advantage. A resentful Hall finally walked away from Can-Am.
In the 1970s, he partnered with Carl Haas to dominate the Formula 5000 series. The last Chaparral was the 2K, which brought ground-effect racing to Indy and a title in the 500 for a Chaparral with Johnny Rutherford at the wheel in 1980. Hall left racing for a decade, only to return in 1991 to compete in Champ Car, with some success.
Despite Chaparral's winning reputation, the innovative and sometimes blazingly fast Can-Am cars they are most known for produced just one win in five years. "To win more races," says Hall, "I should have slowed down the development process and made our cars more reliable. I think I would have been more successful had I not pushed so far out into the unknown, but that was something that was in me. I wanted to build a better race car in any way I could. I wasn't particularly interested in following in the tracks of everybody else and seeing if I could make better pit stops."

This article originally appeared in the June, 2012 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.